Friday, November 06, 2009

There's a splendid car crash of pieties in this wibble from the Chief Rabbi:

"Parenthood involves massive sacrifice: money, attention, time and emotional energy. Where today, in European culture with its consumerism and its instant gratification because you're worth it."

There was no room for sacrifice for "the sake of generations not yet born" in such a culture.

"Europe is dying," he concluded and compared the situation in the continent today to ancient Greece with its "sceptics, epicureans and cynics".

He said: "That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it."

Religion was the safeguard of morality and the decline of religion would lead to fragile families and communities in atrophy.

He has a point in his first paragraph. One of my oldest friends and his partner have been through a harrowing few years of miscarriages and disappointments because they left it too late. That follows a history of abortions-of-convenience in younger years. They are very typical of recent generations. The time to have kids is young adulthood, this does involve sacrifices. People who try to have it all simply transfer the costs of their ambition to their children, who have to bear them or forgo existence entirely.

The glib and complacent description of the source of so much human misery and burnt human flesh for so many centuries as the "safeguard of morality" is just par for the course.

It's the comparison with Climate Change that provides the car crash. Human population growth is one of the factors in climate change, if the alarmists are to be believed. The Rabbi's statement can be re-rendered as follows:

[population should rise] is the moral equivalent of [population should fall]

Europe isn't dying. If the massive expansion of population of the past couple of centuries were to be followed by a levelling off and even a slight contraction, so what? That would be a very good thing in all kinds of ways - especially economic and ecological.